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Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

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Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#21

Post by giraffe_lady »

cogman10 wrote: post #18
octopoc wrote: post #5

The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.

Some of this is visible in the Bible. For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods. From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the c…

I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well.

That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully formed syncretic religion at the time of acculturation of the greek gods into it, having regularly adapted to & adopted nearby belief systems as it encountered them.

Some of the greek gods were fully syncretized with similar-enough roman gods, some only partially, some greek gods were adopted more completely because there was no near enough equivalent, and then some roman gods continued in more or less their previous form, for example janus who the greeks had nothing comparable to. But even a lot of the pre-greek exposure "roman" gods were themselves adopted from other cultures, and/or already syncretized with indigenous ones. In any case it wasn't "mostly" stolen from any one place, it followed a pretty typical pattern for syncretic religions. The acceptance & merging of the greek gods was only one event in what was at the time already a venerable and dynamic religious system.

You also need to be careful about timelines. The greek cultural influence here is at like 800bc, predating the roman republic much less the empire. It arguably predates anything you could reasonably call rome at all, this is in the distant past that was already mythological to the roman republic. This was always part of their cultural essentially.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#22

Post by dragontamer »

bee_rider wrote: post #12
octopoc wrote: post #5

The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.

Polytheism seems to make a lot more sense that way. Cities (and personal trajectories as well) have ups and downs. If you understand it as a competition between various gods, it makes sense that they’d have a lot of back and forth going on. If there’s only one god, it must have some preposterously convoluted plan, it just seems a bit silly.

Monotheism elevates godhood in many regards.

In Polytheistic culture, gods fight and gods die. Zeus eats his (and thus kills) his father Chronos. Thor dies in Ragnarok.

In Monotheistic culture, the one true God is above all else. As it turns out, different Monotheistic cultures can then cooperate as it's an argument over what this one true God believes (Catholics vs Muslims).

Then we get into weird blends like Hindu and their many avatars of Vishnu (who'd argue that Jesus probably existed and could do those things because he probably was that time's Vishnu).

----------

Polytheism is likely flawed as an organizational concept because it's clear that gods were creations of man. Monotheism flips it and makes God the master of the universe while man struggles to understand the nature of God.

---------

But yes. As the sibling comment points out: the gods of most polytheistic cultures are NOT omnipotent or omniscient. They are more powerful or smarter than humans but they are still able to be killed or destroyed.

Maybe back when cities and religions would get wiped out by warfare, it was more common to see religions die out (and thus those old gods die with those religions/cultures). It makes you wonder about the nature of human belief systems and how humans lived differently back then.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#24

Post by lo_zamoyski »

mlinhares wrote: post #15
jschveibinz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is most likely correct. I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Many scholars trace the earliest worship of Yahweh to the southern Levant, possibly Edom, Midian, or Seir which were outside of traditional Canaanite (early Hebrews) centers. Inscriptions from 800 BC refer to “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman,” implying a localized deity. So given that Assyria is in the same geographic region as the Levant, the…

Catholicism maintains it somehow by having "patron saints" and every city picking one up. Most cities in highly Catholic countries will have their own specific saint that they will have a special relationship with.

One difference is that saints are not deities, even if there may be a similar psychological need (for protection, help, etc) in play. Saints do not possess power of their own accord. They function as intercessors. They are still human beings, albeit in an elevated spiritual state or plane, so to speak (a saint is anyone who is saved from hell and in heaven; canonized saints are simply those who are known to be saints and thus formally acknowledged).

Pagan gods are personifications of natural forces, hence Thales's famous remark that "the world is full of gods". They are beings like you and me, in some sense, with powers that we may not possess.

God, on the other hand, is not a personification of a force of nature or one being among many. In that sense, the distinction between monotheism and polytheism can be misleading, because it's not a matter of how many gods you believe in, but a profound difference in understanding of what divinity even means. God here is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, or self-subsisting Being; the verb "to be". This makes God prior to any particular being and the cause of the be-ing of anything and everything at all times.

Whatever the history of the development of theological ideas and beliefs, these must be distinguished from the philosophical substance of the beliefs.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#25

Post by detourdog »

octopoc wrote: post #5

The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.

Thought it was more an ancestral teams. Each city marveling at the founding families.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#26

Post by tiahura »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #21
cogman10 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this is visible in the Bible. For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods. From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the c…

I don't think this is quite true about either group but it's dangerously close if you know what I mean. How & why genesis specifically shares so much content with other stories from the region is an extremely interesting subject in itself and still under active developing scholarship but I'm not qualified represent it well. That's definitely a misunderstanding of the roman pantheon though. It was already a fully form…

Mark S Smith has written pretty persuasively about history of the Jews as El worshipers. See eg Abdeel, Abiel, Adbeel, Amiel, Ariel, Azarel, Azareel, Aziel, Asael, Ashbel, Adael, etc. Yet the paucity of yhwh names. Not to mention, the Bible flat out states as much “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name the LORD (YHWH) I did not make myself known to them.”

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#27

Post by ARandomerDude »

cogman10 wrote: post #18
octopoc wrote: post #5

The Fall of Civilizations podcast has an interesting episode about Assyria. The cities in Mesopotamia were polytheistic and each city has its own deity. Apparently the way they viewed their deities was similar to how we view sports teams. There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god. They viewed inter city warfare as the gods competing in heaven.

Some of this is visible in the Bible. For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods. From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the c…

> El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified.

How does this theory account for the overt hostility to Baal et al. in the Bible?

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#28

Post by dr_dshiv »

If I recall, there are hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform texts—and less than 10% have been translated.

I wish there was a resource that tracked all the untranslated classical texts. For instance, only about 10% of Neo-Latin texts have been translated. It seems to me that the products of the renaissance ought to be a part of the training corpus of AGI.

Re: Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered

#29

Post by dzdt »

wglb wrote: post #2

Source article in the journal Iraq: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S002108892...

I was wondering about the headline date "missing for a millennium", as this Babylon is much older than 1000 years. From the article it seems like "two millenia" is more accurate: "The text survives in 20 manuscripts, from the 7th to the 2nd/1st centuries BCE"
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